Photoshop “Cut Out”
I had an image in my head of the outside of a house while a party was going on so, I grabbed a picture of a house out off of CreativeCommons. I selected each window, and copy/pasted as new layers to create a total of three layers per window. I used the paint bucket tool to color each layer and blended it with the “color burn” option to create that transparency. Then, using the timeline, I dragged and positioned each layer in the timeline so that the windows rotate through all of the different colored layers.
I think this works pretty well – I wish I had found a suitable picture of a house at night because I think that would have worked a little bit better.
Adobe Animate: “Onion-skinning”
Wow. This one was hard. After compleating nearly 100 frames, I was really surprised to see how quickly this animation cycles through because it felt like it took forever to complete. I tried to stick to basic shapes because I was drawing with my finger. I eventually grabbed a stylus, but that didn’t yield better results. If there is one portion of this animation that I think works well, it has to be the solid blue circle that expands and decreases in size because it is the smoothest portion of this GIF.
For this, I just followed the basic tutorial that was posted on Blackboard. I changed the number of frames that the “onion skin” expands over so that I could see the entirety of the animation while I was drawing. I feel like there must be tools that make this easier, but I think that for a first time, it came out alright.
Adobe Animate: “Tweening”
I’m really digging the way this one came out for a first try. Again, I followed the basic tutorial that was posted to Blackboard but wanted to kind of push myself a little bit more on this one. I got the idea after disposing of (another) plant that I couldn’t keep alive. I set up the scene, copied the original frames, and pasted them. I then moved a petal halfway to the table, copied THOSE frames, and pasted it in again and moved the petal to the table. I tried to convey the drop of each petal by rotating the pieces and sizing them down to when they hit the table. A ‘classic tween’ was applied in-between each frame that has a new stage in the animation. The only thing that is annoying, is that the entire scene drops down right before the last petal falls and I’m not sure why. I re-checked my frames and it doesn’t seem like that movement it visible there. I also was expecting the motion of the tween to look a little bit more natural and smooth, so if I were to re-do this, I’d probably want to look up ways to improve on that.
